I still remember the feeling I had of reading this while in school, when it was about five years old; I loved it almost immediately, and I credit it with being one of the first novels to make me question the world around me, even if it wasn't apparent at the time. I mean, honestly, I first read this when I was in seventh grade for school. That was sometime in the late 1990s.

I still have a lot of the same feelings for this novel, though now I'm going to be pushing to read the series; I still need to do that.

I love this book, and it's so difficult to really write a lot of why. It's such a simple tale, starting with such a simple frustration: the knowledge that there's more, that there's something else, that one person is meant to be burdened by the knowledge to make life "simpler" for everyone else. And all of that builds up; it builds through simply adding to the knowledge that there was a world before, that there were feelings before, that 'precise language' isn't so precise (nor can it really be), and changing the knowledge of what it really means to be Released.

And all of that spurs action, shows that something can happen in the simplest of actions by the fewest number of people. Even today, I think especially today, this is a message that needs to be heard again and again.